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Faith sighed irritably. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Okay,” Michael said, a little more sternly. “How about this then? Fuck your feelings. We have a job to do right now, and I need you sharp and in the moment, not moping about an oversight that we’ve now corrected. After we catch this guy, you can go feel sorry for yourself. Sound good?"
Faith’s lips thinned, but Michael was right. It wasn’t good for her to dwell on their mistake right now. “Sounds good.”
“Wonderful. In that case, I won’t waste any more of our time telling you that you’re an idiot for being hard on yourself until after we catch the guy.”
Faith couldn’t quite suppress a smirk. “Sounds good.”
Their new suspect wasn’t someone who purchased the pheromone from Doctor Vanheusen but someone who stole it. They were so focused on Doctor Vanheusen’s activities after his sanctioned research ended that they completely missed the possibility of someone else from the study being the killer. When Doctor Vanheusen admitted to missing several vials of Chlor-Pheromone Six when he shut down the lab at Arizona State, Faith knew immediately the angle they had missed.
“Did anyone besides you have access to the drug cabinet?” she had asked.
“Yes,” Karl had, of course, replied. “His name was Jay Chung.”
Jay Chung, evidently, was Karl’s lab assistant. A quiet, introverted man with a baby face and a soft voice who seemed intent—in Karl’s words—on making as little of an impression on people as possible. Despite this, Karl said, he had a brilliant mind, and often assisted not only with the menial labor of cleaning and preparing equipment but also with devising tests that would demonstrate whether the pheromone worked as intended or not.
“Why didn’t you report the drugs missing?” Michael asked. “You would be completely off the hook for that. They would know right away who took the drugs.”
“Except that you took some yourself, and you didn’t want them looking through your handbag either, did you?” Faith pointed out.
Karl hung his head and said nothing.
Tom had tracked down Jay Chung to an address in the southwestern portion of town, a ten-minute drive from the station. Now, the three federal agents were following four sheriff's department cruisers and two command vehicles to the address, sirens blazing.
“Almost there, Faith,” Michael reassured her. “Just a few more minutes, and then we’ll get this asshole.”
Faith had a feeling it wouldn’t be that easy.
She was right. They arrived to find the house empty. Completely empty. When there was no knock at the door, Tom ordered the officers to break in. They were far less careful than Faith was breaking into Foster Chase’s house, preferring a battering ram to a jeweler’s screwdriver and a bobby pin.
The house told Faith everything she needed to know. There were no fewer than twenty-three dog bowls lined up next to twenty-three different automatic water dispensers. There were an equal number of dog beds, and the fence outside was nearly ten feet high. One portion of the fence was dug out and a length of chicken wire pulled out of the hole. That was probably where the spaniel had escaped.
The house was a mess, dog food spilled everywhere and drawers and cabinets left open. The mess seemed recent, no caked-on dirt, no musty smell. Chung clearly kept his house clean and had simply grabbed essentials and left.
He was fleeing.
She sighed heavily. “All right. He’s clearly not here. He would need a vehicle big enough to transport all of these dogs—a large van or RV or a trailer. See if you can put checkpoints up along the roads leading out of town.”
Tom shook his head. “They won’t let us shut the town down just to look through every RV and tractor-trailer that passes through Goldwood.”
“Well, figure out what theywilldo, Tom!” Faith snapped. “There’s a killer on the run.”
Tom tensed at her tone, but nodded and made the call. Faith sighed and ran her hands through her hair. “We’ll stay here for now,” she said, “in case he comes back. Let’s move the vehicles and shut the lights off so if he…”
Her voice trailed off when she saw a scrap of paper on the floor near the bathroom door. She frowned and picked it up. In a scrawl that would have made every doctor in America proud, she could just decipher,Arthur Warhol, 245 Blanket Drive.
He wasn’t fleeing. Not yet. He was hunting. One last kill, and then he would leave.
“Tom!” she called. “Michael!”
The two of them hurried to her side. She showed them the note, and their eyes widened in realization. Tom immediately called the officers and relayed the new address.
They left Jay’s house and rushed to 245 Blanket Drive. That was another ten-minute drive, but they made it in six, using sirens and loudspeakers to clear the road. Faith did some quick mental calculations in her head. If he had all of his dogs, he had to be in a large vehicle, and that meant a slow vehicle. Not to mention the fact that such a vehicle would be conspicuous. The neighbors would have noticed if he parked a large van or truck on a cul-de-sac. If the killer wasn’t there when they arrived, they could ask the neighbors if they’d seen anything and hopefully get the exact vehicle and put out an APB.
The killer wasn’t there, and neither was Arthur Warhol. What was there was a rusted wire crate with a pile of dog feces in one corner, dog urine in another and a few moldy kibbles in another.
Well, there was the motive. Jay Chung had found himself another abusive owner.
